Well-heeled suburbia on Christmas Eve is not the most dangerous venue on the planet, but in The Ref it becomes “the fifth circle of hell” for a brainy burglar on the lam. Ted Demme’s bawdy domestic comedy fairly shouts “high concept,” and there’s no point in arguing with witty writers…
Shirley MacLaine may believe she was Dolly Madison or Mary Todd Lincoln in a previous life, but right now her only shot at First Ladyhood comes in a hot-and-cold comedy called Guarding Tess. The widow of a beloved president, Tess Carlisle is regarded by all America as a living monument…
Wednesday March 9 Instrumental to the case: A glance at the career of English guitarist Andy Summers will always include a big checkmark by the Police–the pop trio in which he made his name. But the talented Summers has long abandoned the simple formulas that worked so well for that…
Thirty years after her death, Marilyn Monroe’s legendary image retains its fascination and allure. Marilyn in her many guises embodies all aspects of The Goddess–virgin, whore, would-be mother, muse, crone. She symbolizes postwar America, fun and glamour, woman as sex object and vessel–and woman as exploited, abused victim. The arc…
We still pay for the Vietnam War. Tracers, now playing at the Theatre on Broadway, gives us another window onto that experience. A collaborative effort written by John DiFusco and seven other vets, the play is part group therapy, part high drama and part history lesson. The story takes seven…
Vietnam’s nascent film industry does not yet command the world’s attention, but in this country an amazing first feature by 32-year-old Tran Anh Hung may catch the eye of Oliver North as well as that of Oliver Stone. The Scent of Green Papaya has already won the Camera d’Or prize…
John Bailey, who makes his directorial debut with a sex thriller called China Moon, has been the cinematographer on such beautifully photographed movies as Ordinary People, Accidental Tourist and In the Line of Fire. It’s a good thing, too. The strength of this conventional Nineties film noir is its dark,…
Wednesday March 2 This one’s for the Gypsies: Pure, unadulterated spectacle is the name of the game tonight at the Auditorium Theatre, 13th and Curtis, where the seventy-member Hungarian State Folk Ensemble will perform at 8 p.m. The troupe of dancers, singers and musicians–direct from Budapest–combine whirling skirts, gypsy fiddles…
The word “thrash” brings to mind visions of stage diving and shrieking feedback. At the THRASH Open Show at Edge Gallery, however, the term takes on new significance. According to curator Sherrie Ingle, THRASH stands for “The Harshest Radical Art Since Hell.” But the art here, though outrageous at times,…
Sam Shepard can be pretty self-indulgent when he wants to be. States of Shock is one of those one-acts that seem to have risen out of a dense intellectual fog. The play is primarily an attack on war itself. There’s an indictment in it somewhere about the treatment (read: abandonment)…
You can romanticize the rodeo, as Cliff Robertson did 23 years ago in J.W. Coop, or you can use it to show how modern life has trivialized the mythic skills of cowboys, as Sam Peckinpah did in Junior Bonner and Sydney Pollack did in The Electric Horseman. But you can’t…
From the dark mirth of Mark Twain, to the domestic chaos of Kurt Vonnegut and Edward Albee, to the everyday dysfunction of The Simpsons, satirists have gotten under the placid surface of American life to find the demons lurking below–the idiot uncles and poisoners of pot roast, the third-generation addicts…
Wednesday February 23 Picture this: The Colorado History Museum has just the thing for all you Colorado history buffs: an ongoing Western Authors Lecture Series focusing on books detailing life as it progressed in our little corner of the world. Tonight’s 7 p.m. lecture puts William and Elizabeth Jones on…
Contemporary Native American artists face a strange dilemma. The same white race that tried to destroy them now wants to celebrate their dying culture–not to mention profit from it. Art that supposedly revives ancient Indian traditions, fulfilling the white buyer’s expectations of what Indian art “should” look like, still fills…
John Merrick had a terrible disease (never correctly diagnosed, but now considered “Proteus syndrome”) that so disfigured him, he was known as the “Elephant Man” to the society that first abused and then protected him. Victorian England could be incredibly perverse in a way we scarcely can comprehend. Victorianism brought…
For thirty years Hollywood considered sports movies box-office poison–even after Rocky Balboa went the distance with Apollo Creed. The American sports mania didn’t hit the movie industry until the mid-Eighties–about the time Resume Speed, Texas, got wired for cable–but right now the white men who run the show can’t jump…
It’s ironic, isn’t it, that filmmakers keep trying to reinvent Don Siegel’s 1956 horror classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers? Philip Kaufman did it in 1978, and Abel Ferrara is taking his shot this year. Let’s hope that each of them grasps the implications of cloning a movie about the…
Wednesday February 16 Good as Goulet: Got those post-Valentine blues? Cheer yourself up with a little chivalry and romance–go see Robert Goulet reprise his made-to-order role as King Arthur in Camelot, on stage this week at the Buell Theatre, 13th and Curtis St. Evening performances are at 8 p.m. tonight…
Stock Show season traditionally gives Denver galleries a yearly opportunity, if not a mandate, to showcase art of the West. Most of it stereotypically portrays the romantic ideals of cowboy life, often expertly mimicking work from the era of the Golden West, say, 1860-1920. Among the herd, The West as…
Of all Tennessee Williams’s sometimes brilliant but always anguished works, Suddenly Last Summer is the most difficult to produce. The structure of the play is so awkward and the horrors so thick that melodrama sneaks in unbidden at every turn. The first of two one-act plays included in a program…
The late Sam Peckinpah’s lively chase movie The Getaway is unlikely to catch The Wild Bunch or Major Dundee on the all-time Peckinpah hit parade. For one thing, the acting skills of ex-model Ali McGraw, who co-starred with Steve McQueen 22 years ago, will never be the stuff of cult…
Johnny, the sardonic young drifter at the center of Mike Leigh’s startling new film Naked, is a kind of serial killer, but he carries no gun, rope or knife. A street-tough British bloke from Manchester, he can be physically brutal with women, but he specializes in maiming his victims emotionally–by…
